Next Week
First, let’s get this week’s leftovers out of the way. I wrote in last week’s Next Week that I would supply responses to Election and the original Diabolique. Election is very obviously designed as a two parter, and being that the second part, Triad Election, is sitting on my desk, I figured we’ll just slide that one into next week and look at both of them at the same time.
Diabolique, unless you count the Sharon Stone remake that I haven’t seen, doesn’t have a second part that I know of, unless you also want to try and count a really lame bit of direct to cable Dennis Hopper wannabe erotica that borrows the film’s famous (and chilling) central image of someone who should be dead in a bathtub turning out not to be so dead. Something tells me you don’t want to count either of these, and so I owe you a review. In case I don’t show up to pay, let’s just say that I really enjoyed Henri-Georges Clouzot’s film, particularly the terrifying final forty-five minutes. The picture has a famous twist but, like Psycho, which Diabolique at least partially inspired, the twist has been dulled a bit through numerous ripping off. See it though, Diabolique has a cold, clammy, sexually repressed stuck in the attic vibe that works on you.
Speaking of copping out on the Diabolique review, I am going to start writing full reviews of classic, revered films, hopefully on a once a week basis. Being that I try to pass myself off as someone who knows a little something here, I try to make it a priority to catch up with one classic I haven’t seen a week. I haven’t been writing about these on the site, primarily because I’m a bit of a scaredy cat, and don’t like competing with years of established theory. Time to suck it up and venture out a little bit.
So next week will be:Election/Triad Election, Lust, Caution (for real this time), The Golden Compass (maybe), The Girl Next Door (if I can get it), mystery classic (though I have a pretty good idea of what it will be).
This week is a little more up in the air than usual, but don’t worry, we”ll kill those work hours somehow. Happy Hunting,
Chuck
Waitress (2007)
I give writer-director-co-star Adrienne Shelly this, her Waitress is weird and has conviction in itself. No post modern stuff here, Shelly wants you to fully feel for Jenna (Kerri Russell), the waitress who’s brilliant with pies but a little haphazard in her dealings with men, including her husband (Jeremy Sisto), and the new doctor (Nathan Fillion). One of these guys is a manipulative, controlling lout, the other is a sign post for a better life. I give you one guess which is which. If you guess wrong you may actually enjoy the movie.
The primary problem with Waitress, and it has a few, is that it’s as indecisive as the titular character. You can’t get a handle on the film, and to a certain extent I admire that, but here it ultimately cancels itself out. You essentially think you’re in for a goofy little romantic comedy, but the film keeps pulling the rug out from under that. The Jeremy Sisto scenes are the strongest in the movie, but they don’t belong in this movie, they’re too grim and realistic for a film that largely aspires to be a cartoon. It should be said though that Sisto, an underrated actor, is effective.
The film isn’t very funny even when it’s trying to be though. Waitress is another of those condescending Hollywood versions of a “small town” movie, where everyone talks like an ironically articulate hill billy, and the “quirk” is layed on to the point of suffocation. Shelly is taking a risk here, if you’re going to play the stylized dialogue game, then you better be a virtuoso, you better be a Preston Sturges, or a David Mamet, or a Quentin Tarantino, or a Billy Wilder (and he had a few rough patches too). Otherwise, you’re better advised to eavesdrop while writing.
The film also has a bad habit of squandering good will just as its beginning to build up a little with indulgent, annoying little visual ticks. There’s a scene between Fillion and Russell, about a half hour in, where they kiss by mutual accident. The film was beginning to get me, I admired that we didn’t spend another hour beating around this particular bush. What does Shelly do? She kills it with an obnoxious, cliched, jokey 180 degree pan that deflates the charm of the scene.
Waitress finally, mildly, finds its footing in the last half hour. Shelly commits to staging a coming of age melodrama and pars away most of the other indulgences. Jenna has a baby, and as tired as I am of that particular development, Shelly catches something genuine here. She finds that brief respite that a child can hold for someone, and her point of view is surprisingly tough. I imagine that Waitress’s third act is the movie Shelly wanted to make, and it took her ninety some half baked pages to get there. The final image of the film is lovely, moving, and earned, the first time in the entire film that Shelly really brings off the whimsy she’s been trying too hard for.
Look ladies, I understand why you go to these types of films, men fantasize about finding an understanding someone too, but your standards should be higher. Older folks like to mourn the passing of good cinema, and that’s largely nostalgic crap, with the exception of one genre: the witty, urbane romantic comedy. We have no exceptional filmmakers in this field currently working. Rent Ernst Lubitsch classics like The Shop Around the Corner or the even better Trouble in Paradise. Rent Preston Sturges’ The Lady Eve, or, even though it barely applies to the current discussion, Unfaithfully Yours. See what a really charming, romantic film can be. And hold our current filmmakers to these standards. You should hold your men to these standards too, but that’s none of my business.
★★
Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers: Runnin’ Down a Dream (2007)
Peter Bogdanovich’s Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers: Runnin’ Down a Dream proves once again that even the most overused of formulas can be rewarding in the right hands. The formula in this case is the Behind the Music style documentary or, if we wish to be so bold, the “rock doc.” Bogdanovich doesn’t reinvent the cliches or the visual grammar of the genre (talking heads, archive footage) but he does transcend them. Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers: Runnin’ Down a Dream is a treat, an exhilaration, and it says something about Bogdanovich’s smooth craftsmanship that you, for once, want to swallow the film’s Kool-Aid. You don’t feel hustled or cheated; you go along with the good time flow.
It should be said, of course, that Runnin’ Down a Dream (lame title) is going to be more of a pleasure for those who actually, you know, enjoy Tom Petty and his music. It seems that Tom Petty, like Steven Spielberg, is a foregone conclusion, so acclaimed in their field that they might actually be underrated. Saying you like Tom Petty has become a boring thing to say, and some may have even grown to resent the continued love for him, or the fact that he’s become another of these rockers that has kept rocking well into their third decade of output. A complaint I hear from many is that his music is too “simple.”
This complaint must be prevalent, because it is worked into the narrative of Dream, which has an appealingly free form structure. Bogdanovich doesn’t chart a typical rise, fall, rise, rise, fall scenario with obligatory hope at the end; Dream is instead structured like an actual piece of rock journalism, with digressions, episodes, little self-contained narrative atoms that cohere to tell a story of the band’s albums, their experience, etc. Petty is essentially allowed to narrate his own story through an assemblege of interviews and he emerges the same strange, charismatic figure that he always has, part country boy, part scarecrow, the rare rock star who feels authentically vulnerable. The film manages the tricky tone of honoring Petty, of seeing the glass primarily only half full, without appearing to kiss his ass.
This generosity is also extended to Dream’s running time. At just under four hours, the films feels roomy as opposed to bloated, which is a danger with that kind of length. We don’t feel as if our hand is being tugged from one hit to another in time for the next ad for Gatorade or Nikes. When the film builds to the playing of a song, YOU ACTUALLY HEAR THE ENTIRE SONG. The songs are allowed to act as catharsis, the reward of withstanding long studio hours, bickering, egos, and other production antics. Runnin’ Down a Dream catches, fleetingly, and lightly, the joy of creation. This is the benefit of having a major filmmaker behind the scenes, it served Bob Dylan in the brilliant No Direction Home, and it serves Petty here. Someone (maybe Dylan) said that all directors want to be rock stars, and that all rock stars want to be directors. I can buy that, the empathy here is palpable.
★★★½
Shooter (2007)
Shooter is a return to the kind of meat and potatoes action that was more fashionable in the 1980s. The film, true to its title, is content to blow people and squibs up in a number of ways. Yes, I said squibs. Blood actually squirts out of the wounds that are inflicted upon the various goons, henchmen and more goons that are at the disposal of Evil Republican (Ned Beatty) and Vague Evil Republican Military Colonel (Danny Glover). E.R. and V.E.R.M.C. recruit the Shooter, aka Bobby Lee Swagger (Mark Wahlberg, and yes, that character name was dreamed up by a Pulitzer Prize winning film critic) to do something that has something to do with preventing an assassination of the president by providing them with the perfect way to assassinate the president. Forgive Shooter. He’s been in the Middle East and hasn’t seen as many of these movies as we have.
But I’m losing sight of the true appeal of the film. Shooter, unlike the majority of clutter that gets passed off as action, is content to have people shoot at one another in a number of ways. This, by itself, is enough to qualify the film as a minor relief. Huge trucks don’t collide into one another in front of the Empire State building. There are no superheroes. No robots. No aliens. There are no attempts to dress Shooter up as something more legitimate with a handheld camera. The film is simply about a guy who shoots people in their heads, retires after a screw up (of course), and, upon being fucked over again, resumes shooting people in the heads. If Shooter had been made in 1985, it would have starred Schwarzenegger and had a now off putting swinging big dick, glad to be killing people again vibe going on. Shooter updates the formula (slightly), and casts those same big dicks as the villians. Swagger, true to the new politically correct man, is (slightly) more thoughtful and hesitant.
Shooter is fine for what it is. It’s a little sluggish and jargon heavy, and it could use a bit more Beatty and Glover, but it gets the job done as these things go. There is a climax involving snowbound sniping that’s pretty nifty. The film is also an important evolutionary step for star Mark Wahlberg, who is generally only as good as his material. He’s fine if the film is good or the part is juicy (Fear, Boogie Nights, I Heart Huckabees) but he’s usually on shakier ground in the bigger, boring paycheck pictures (Planet of the Apes, The Italian Job). Here he takes the paycheck and does a dutiful job of the connect the dots masculine performance, thus ensuring that the dogs will keep eating until Paul Thomas Anderson or David O. Russell come calling again.
*And, yes, I know that I never mentioned the shotgun, the girl, or the bra that happen to appear in the picture that I’ve chosen to headline the post. I would just relax and trust that that image does eventually appear in the film, and is thus fair game.
★★½
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